This Webster Groves Lustron home is one of a few dozen in the St. Louis area.

If you spend a day cruising through St. Louis and its outlying counties, you might notice a dozen or so strange, near-identical homes that appear to be composed of squares. They vary in color—some blue, others tan or yellow—but all share a Lego-like, glossy exterior.

These homes, manufactured by Lustron, are rare artifacts of the 1940s, according to Michael Allen, director of the Preservation Research Office.

And right now, preservationists are trying to keep them intact. In the St. Louis area, Allen estimates that at least 10–20 Lustron homes exist, three of which are located in the city. Others can be sighted in Webster Groves, Brentwood, Crestwood, and around North County. But most nearby counties don’t have preservation laws. “Lustron homes are not protected,” says Allen. “So when people want to tear them down, they get a demolition permit, and most people don’t even realize it until it’s happened.”

This Lustron, which briefly went up for auction, retains its original steel siding.

A call went out around preservationist communities last week when a Lustron located in Franz Park went up for tax sale: They wanted to keep it out of the hands of developers who might demolish the home. (The property has since been removed from the sale; according to a representative of the city, that likely means that the owners worked something out with the revenue office.)

And there's good reason to preserve them, says Allen. Lustrons are a remnant of post–World War II history, a “short-lived experiment” in mechanizing the production of the American home, and an “endangered species.” While some Lustron homes are on the National Register of Historic Places, many, like those around St. Louis, have no protection.

More than 2,500 Lustrons were built in the United States during the late 1940s, when the fledgling Lustron Corporation received a government grant to build manufactured homes for GIs returning home to a housing shortage.

Allen explains, “Lustron was an attempt to address the post-WWII housing issue with a standardized metal house. It was a mass-produced, steel-framed house, clad in [steel] enamel 2-foot-by-2-foot panels that supposedly would be easy to ship out, easy to build.” They were also intended to be easy to maintain and long-lasting, even against dramatic weather.

And so far—unusually—many have stood up to that promise.

“They don’t rust. You never have to paint them. You never have to replace the roof,” says Toby Weiss a mid-century modern architecture enthusiast and blogger at B.E.L.T., The Built Environment in Layman’s Terms. She considers Lustron a peak remnant of the mid-century modern period. “If you left your Lustron alone, the only thing that you’d have to do is basically wash it in the fall and spring.”

With some caveats: If you break the enamel seal over the steel panels, they will rust; the roofs haven’t needed replacement yet, about 70 years after construction. Still, many similar attempts to create indestructible roofs have failed. Meanwhile, Lustrons “are every bit as durable and long-lasting as the Lustron corporation thought they would be. Their invention has proven to live up to all the promises,” says Allen.

He adds, “Basically, Lustron involved taking engineering that had been used in industrial design for military structures during the war and adapting it to suburban home building.”

Lustron planned to build tens of thousands of homes in the United States, but despite their supposedly streamlined manufacturing and construction process, the company was beset by delivery, distribution, and funding problems, as well as conflicts with local codes that, for instance, didn't allow metal chimneys. Lustron eventually declared bankruptcy after building just a fraction of what they planned. Today, Allen estimates, only about 1,200 Lustron homes still stand. (An online registry previously tracked existing Lustron homes, but it went offline in the last few years.)

While you might expect them to feel outdated, Weiss—who has written about Lustrons on several occasions, as well as worked for a company that renovated one professionally—believes, with conviction, that they can adapt well to modern life. There’s a reason, she says, that “you even still have homeowners who are the single owners of a Lustron.”

It’s tiny-home living with some adaptations. You need industrial strength magnets to hang things on the walls, for instance. But they can be surprisingly spacious, especially if they still have the original features that made them so convenient and affordable for GIs last century. Metal pocket doors diminish the occupied floor-space; built-in wall units—a hutch separates the kitchen and dining room, while a closet, dresser, and vanity occupy the master bedroom from floor to ceiling—maximize storage space and minimize the necessary furniture. All you’d need to furnish the bedroom in an original Lustron? A bed and a side table, says Weiss.

“All they did was borrow the concept of built-ins from the arts and crafts movement, when they started building bungalows in the 1910s and ‘20s,” explains Weiss. “Those houses were small, but they perfected the art of living.”

Floor-to-ceiling closets with built-in dressers and vanity make the master bedroom in many Lustron models luxurious, spacious, and livable.

They’re also reparable—and flexible. Because so many Lustrons have been demolished and deconstructed across the country, there’s a wealth of spare Lustron parts available on the internet; they're interchangeable. Weiss suspects that you could conceivably build a new addition entirely from other Lustron parts. (One Lustron close to the River Des Peres, she's observed, has two colors of wall panels, possibly indicating that the owners have repaired it with another home's parts.)

A newly purchased Lustron could also be dismantled, packed up, shipped to a new location, and reconstructed on a fresh concrete slab, should the owner desire. Each part is numbered, and diagrams depict the construction process. “Literally, it’s like putting together a LEGO house,” Weiss says.

Once you find a contractor who actually knows what a Lustron is, many renovation projects are also as simple as popping out the steel panels, doing the job, and replacing the walls. There's no need for messy plaster removal.

Allen also believes that Lustrons can find new use as modern dwellings, even though they fell out of vogue over the years. “They’re lovely; they’re beautiful,” he says. “I also think the small size might be a virtue as we face energy and climate crises.”

As for Weiss, she hopes that when future Lustrons come up on the market (or on eBay, where a number have been sold in recent years), true history-lovers—not developers—will snap them up, buff their panels, and love them back into top condition. She says, “I want some twenty-somethings or early thirty-somethings who would like to have a unique, low-maintenance, retro house that they can live in.”